


Keeping On Your Toes

by Prinzenhasserin



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Ballet, Canon Compliant, F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 12:59:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15268005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/pseuds/Prinzenhasserin
Summary: Lilia Baranovskaya is the first ballerina Minako manages to see on stage, and then fifteen years later, she manages to experience her off-stage, too.





	Keeping On Your Toes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



The black swan takes its final half-hearted jump and folds down on the stage. The music slows, stops. 

Minako is seven, she's in the audience with her entire elementary school ballet class, and she can't stop crying about the death of the poor swan. She knew going in what the ballet was about—they danced it for their very first performance, although a very abridged version, which was why their teacher had decided they could see this one.

Minako's mother thinks it's a frivolous hobby, she thinks a man doesn't want a woman who has no breasts and does ballet, as if one necessarily follows the other, and she should rather be focusing on her studies, so that she may find a good school. Her father isn't worried, though, thinks her enthusiasm is charming, and since she has kept up her grades, there's nothing to worry about.

Minako isn't thinking about any of that, though. Minako is thinking about the most impressive performance she has ever seen (and she is right to be impressed, it's also the best performance her teacher has ever seen, only she is too distracted by caring for 12 other kids to get quite into the performance like Minako did). The prima ballerina is Lilia Baranovskaya, and she is the youngest prima ballerina to dance on the Tokyo Ballet stage.

Lilia Baranovskaya, in her makeup as the Black Swan, is almost unbearably beautiful. Her movements are so very clear, and her death so very sad, and Minako sobs and wants an encore. When the black swan appears for a final goodbye, she cannot stop her crying, but she is so very happy.

They don’t get to meet the cast as their teacher promised, because Akiko has to use the bathroom. Minako almost murders her in the bus.

 

Minako continues her ballet lessons. It's a nice way to evade her mother's hysterics about good grades and nice men she could marry. She gets breasts, but there not substantial enough to impede her ballet career to her mother's unending despair. She's good at ballet, though, and she's keeping her grades up—and the ballet might yet win her a scholarship to a prestigious university or so her mother keeps hoping.

When her father takes her with him on his business trip to Moscow, she manages to persuade him to take her to a performance of the Bolshoi ballet. She's impressed with the Moscow everything, and isn't sure how she's supposed to describe the pure chaos, and intangible beauty of the Moscow underground to anyone who hadn't been there—it's a very different culture to Japan.

The ballet company is dancing the Bolero, and she knows her father is shocked from the, well, modern image that the theatre is dipped in--the black interior with the sparse red highlights. The music is exciting, fresh. Her father doesn't usually see anything experimental, the performances Minako drags him to are very staid in their classical beauty. She's sixteen, though, and the Bolero is exotic, invigorating, enchanting.

Lilia is the only woman on stage, surrounded by 40 men, and yet, undeniably, the focus is on her. She's 35, now, and there's whispers from her rivals that she should be retiring, that she should open her place in the company for younger, fresher blood. This performance seemed built to quiet her naysayers—it seems like temptation herself has come to the stage to seduce the audience. There's so much focus on her swaying and rocking, and the beat is just undeniable something sexual. 

Her father can't quite find words to describe the performance. But it has awakened something in Minako—a hunger, a thirst, for more, for her to be able to weave the same sort of thrall over any audience.

 

Looking at Lilia Baranovskaya dance from the back of a corps de ballet is a difference experience altogether. It's the first and only performance of the prima ballerina assoluta with the Tokyo ballet corps— an unusual arrangement, and Minako can't help being three times as nervous as at similiar productions with the Tokyo prima ballerina, who happens to be Russian, too. There hasn't been a Japanese prima ballerina yet, and her mother is of the opinion that there never will be. Why use Japanese ducklings, when they could use Western swans?

Minako doesn't care. If Minako can't become a swan, she's going to become a peasant girl, or a firebird, or a naiad, or the fucking Princess of China. She knows she has the talent to excel, and she impresses her teachers. She's waiting for an offer to become a Coryphee, or maybe an offer from a different ballet company, one who can give her the breadth of experience she needs to become a soloist.

In her deepest dreams she hopes it will be Lilia Baranovskaya who offers her a place at the Bolshoi, but that is ridiculous and she probably wouldn't have the authority to do so. When the invitation to dance for the entrance exams flutters into her postbox, she badgers her father for a ticket to Moscow immediately.

 

The dying swan dips, and with 50 other dancers Minako moves in unison to plaster themselves to the ground to direct the attention just on her, Lilia Baranovskaya. She's finally dancing on the same stage with her, all her childhood dreams fulfilled. And yet, there she is, yearning for more.

She wants Lilia Baranovskaya, the Madame Baranovskaya of the Bolshoi, to acknowledge her as an equal. Minako wants her in the same trance that Lilia manages to put on her, night after night, with her elegant movements and precise economic steps.

Of course, even with the talent Minako shows, in between the best dancers of the entire world, she's only a substitute for the substitutes, and she can only hope to gain Lilia Baranovskaya's attention. Even though she's much nearer in distance, she still feels as if she's halfway around the world from her favourite idol. 

Minako stays late in the practise rooms, comes early in the morning, just so she can try to catch a glimpse of Lilia's —Madame Baranovskaya's— dancing. It's always only small pieces of choreography, high jumps, footwork techniques. She hopes Lilia will catch glimpses of her. She despairs over Lilia catching glimpses of her, and Minako falling short of an intangible goal.

And yet somehow, even the technical practises manage to pull Minako further into her thrall. The way Lilia sets her feet is very elegant, the way her body bends brings to mind the Russian birch tree in the winter storms.

Lilia was married, they tell her, to the premier figure skater of the country—and in her freetime, she liked to coach the figure skaters. Minako, who grew up in the countryside and only later moved to Tokyo for easier access to the better schools, knows how to skate, and starts haunting the skating rinks. There's not much more to skating than there is to ballet—for skating, the moves might need to be a little less precise, and the speed helped a lot in turning your jumps around, whereas ballet came from the momentum created by your own body alone.

It's after the usual training has stopped, when the quiet has settled over the training studios, and the only thing accompanying her training regimen is the loudness of her breathing, that Lilia notices her for the first time. Oh, they have said their helloes, the usual Break-your-legs', Can-you-hold-the-door's or How's-the-stitching-your-Shoes' but the corps de ballet is everchanging, one much like the other with no special distinction whatsoever.

"Your form is quite good," Madame Baranovskaya says, and Minako who has just turned on the ball of her foot falls over, and lays out on the floor in shame.

The Madame Baranovskaya laughs.

Minako hides her head in her hands. "I'm normally not that unstable," she says through her fingers.

Madame Baranovskaya has the compassion to stop laughing. "I know," she says. "I've been watching you."

Minako, who, although fair-skinned, doesn't blush very often, can feel her face growing warm. "Thank you, Madame Baranovskaya. That's very kind to say."

The prima ballerina of the Bolshoi laughs—it's throaty and intimate. "I'm not known to be kind," she replies. "But I am here to ask you to try out for the understudy examinations. I'd love to train up someone like you." Her gaze feels heavy, deliberate in her appraisal of Minako's body. She isn't used to appreciation that blatantly from a woman of Madame Baranovskaya's calibre. Isn't sure if most of it isn't wishful thinking. Madame Baranovskaya is so much older, so much wiser than her.

Minako gets up, sits back on her heels and looks up. "Really?" she asks, having trouble comprehending that this is Lilia Baranovskaya, her longtime aspiration, asking her if she'd consider understudying under her. There's not a lot Minako wouldn't do if Lilia asked her to do it.

"You certainly have the ability to draw a gaze," Madame Baranovskaya says, then holds out her hand to help Minako to her feet. She's entirely professional for the brief time they're together to close the studio since it is past the usual closing time and the cleaning service is eager to close up behind them. If Minako has entirely inappropriate feelings about the interlude, then that is that.

 

Minako works hard for her examination, and she manages to get the coveted job of being Lilia Baranovskaya's understudy. She's twenty-two, the first East Asian to step foot into the shoes of one of the Bolshoi's prima ballerinas, and even if she's only the substitute, only the understudy should the worst happen to the Bolshoi's shining star—it's a huge accomplishment. There are certainly people who envy her position, especially since she's not even an official student of the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, the Bolshoi's adjacent affiliate.

There's no end to how many hours she spends with Lilia Baranovskaya. Sometimes, other ballerinas and other teachers join them, but there is a lot hanging on Minako following the exact steps of her performance. Sometimes, she needs to train with Lilia's partner, Rudolf Nureyev, sometimes with his understudy, Igor Zelensky. But none she relishes more than the exhausting hours she spends with Lilia telling her to jump higher, jump again with her legs extended more, jump with her hands bowed, and jump yet again. She's not showing herself to her best, since the training is long and leaves her red and sweating, her shoes almost destroyed from the hour-long practices, and all her training leotards pretty much see-through from the stress. But at night, she replays the innocent touches that are held a smidge too long, the way Lilia strokes along her inner thigh to get her to extend her legs just that bit more, and comes around her fingers silently, so as not to disturb her roommates.

One the day she's dancing the entire ballet to show she is capable of substituting for the Lilia Baranovskaya, she can see her watching in the wings. The theatre is almost empty—not many people want to see the no-name ballerina from Japan butcher the Grande Dame of Ballet's masterpiece, but Minako only needs her eyes on her anyway. There's nobody else she needs to impress quite like Lilia herself.

And when she sinks, exhausted, into the final pose, the splattering of applause feels like acknowledgement to her, even if she has only eyes for the familiar silhouette at the beginning of row 3. Lilia's eyes are on her, have remained on her through the 2 hours of dancing. Minako is probably misreading the pride shining in her eyes, because who would want their understudy to do well? It was not uncommon to switch lesser known ballerinas out at the last minute.

The director nods. Her performance was acceptable. She's allowed to clear off while he chews out the chorus for lagging behind on the music. When she comes out of backstage, a towel wrapped around her neck, Lilia is waiting for her. She's standing right in front of the changing room. There's no other reason she would be waiting there.

Minako's heart is already fast from the exertion, but now her heart might be trying to jump out of her chest. She's not read the signs wrong after all. "Do you want to come in?" she asks.

Silently, Lilia ducks into the changing room. Minako looks around to see if anyone noticed, but they're all busy enough with themselves, this being one of the last practises before the premiere. Now, they're standing across from each other, both at an awkward distance. This part was always easier with dramatic gestures and pas de deuces that used the same theme, and it was absolutely unfair, because the way Minako felt deserved the dramatic music and sweeping gestures.

"And? Did it look as awkward as it felt?" Minako manages to say finally.

Lilia smiles, ruefully. "Igor could use some work on the pas de dex. But you certainly managed to entrance me in your performance." She takes a step closer, and what reply Minako could have made, sticks to her throat.

Lilia looks like she's come fresh out of the gigantic poster hanging in the Red Square Underground Station, loudly advertising the Bolshoi Ballet, and Minako looks like, well. Like she had just danced her heart out. 

And yet, the way Lilia is looking at her makes her feel like she isn't red and splotchy, and her hair isn't all over the place. Lilia reaches out, and Minako suddenly feels delicate, like she could shatter apart from just one wrong move. Their lips meet, and it feels like every single moment of her life has lead to this place, as if it couldn't have ended any other way. And yet, Minako wants more. She doesn't want an end, she wants a beginning— and it feels like that, too.

Lilia's lips are soft, yielding, for all that she seems like an unconquerable empress, and when Minako pulls her down further, she goes willingly.

When they part, both of their lips are swollen. And then Minako says, "You know, you were dancing the first ballet I had ever been to."


End file.
